Her heartless opponents advanced to the attack, and seizing the arms of the chair bore it swiftly, occupant and all, down the passage. Joan, utterly unprepared for these tactics, was at first too taken aback to do anything but shriek and wield the loofah; but shortly recovering her presence of mind, she slipped off the seat, and, doubling round her bearers, who were hampered by the chair, scampered back towards the bathroom--only to run heavily into the arms of an unyielding, sunburned, and highly embarrassed gentleman, who had been standing nervously on the other side of the door of that apartment for the last five minutes, awaiting an opportunity to escape, and had suddenly emerged therefrom on a dash to his bedroom, under the perfectly correct impression that it was a case of now or never. "Oh, I _beg_ your--Why, it's Hughie!" cried Joan. "Yes, it _really_ is!" They recoiled, and stood surveying each other. It was their first meeting. Hughie, owing to a breakdown on the branch line, had arrived late the night before, after the ladies had gone to bed. Joan and he had not set eyes on each other for nine years. Miss Gaymer recovered her equanimity first. "You're not a bit changed, Hughie," she observed with a disarming smile. "A little browner--that's all. Am I?" Hughie did not answer for a moment. He was genuinely astonished at what he had just seen, and not a little shocked. Where young girls are concerned, there is no greater stickler for propriety than your man of the world; and this sudden instance of the latter-day _camaraderie_ of young men and maidens had rather taken Hughie's breath away. He felt almost as fluttered as an early Victorian matron. Suddenly he realised that he had been asked a question. "Changed?" he said haltingly. "Well, it's rather hard to say, until--until--" "Until I've got my hair up and more clothes on?" suggested Miss Gaymer. "Perhaps you're right. Still, I look rather nice, don't you think?" she added modestly, preening herself in the kimono. "However, you'll see me at breakfast. Meanwhile I want you to hold those two boys back while I get into the bathroom. Ta-ta, dears!" And with an airy wave of her hand to the unwashed and discomfited firm of Dicky and Cherub, who stood grinning sheepishly in the background, Hughie's ward slipped under her guardian's arm and disappeared into the bathroom, with a swish of cærulean drapery and a triumphant banging of the door.